


The Girl of Your Dreams

by seraphcelene



Category: Man of Steel (2013), Superman (Comics)
Genre: DC Cinematic Universe - Freeform, DC Extended Universe - Freeform, DCEU - Freeform, F/M, Phantom Zone AU, Post-Man of Steel (2013), Superman Played by Henry Cavill, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 03:24:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21331474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: Trust me, I just wanna see you bleed.This is not a romance. Faora-Ul is both all of Nathan Hardy's favorite sci-fi soldier queens and also like none of them at all. He is the thing Faora likes to hurt to make herself feel better.post-movie AU: what would life be like if they both survived the Phantom Drive collision.So, you know how in the comics, Faora is a murderous man-hating psychopath? Yeah, this is glancing off that story … Plus, there was that one scene in the movie Man of Steel. In the desert. Col Hardy's eyes widening when Faora came down the gangplank all suited and booted and clearly a girl. It was all aggressive attraction, Hardy being all "I AM A GUY, and in charge" and Faora, well, we all know Faora is crazy AF.This is that story.
Relationships: Nathan Hardy/Faora-Ul
Kudos: 9





	The Girl of Your Dreams

“A good death is its own reward.”

Only Nathan doesn’t die despite Faora killing him every night. He regrets the taunt as he drowns from the inside, Faora standing over him, his breather hanging limp in her hand and her sky-light eyes narrowed in the suggestion of a smile. He regrets his temper and the misogyny, and that damn stare down in the desert. Equal parts _who does this bitch think she is_ and _fuck, she’s too hot to be the bad guy._

Nathan lets his eyes roll back, panting around the fluid in his lungs. He pictures her as she had been then, striding down the dropship’s gangplank, smaller than he had imagined, and obviously girl shaped -- breasts and waist enhanced by the curve of the armor.

Women could be soldiers, of course they could, but somehow it had never once even entered his mind that it would be a space _woman_ and not a space _man_ who came to collect the alien. Until there was Faora on the gangplank, every fantasy he’d ever had about Samus Aran in the flesh.

There was anger then, a hard, red knot of it in the center of his chest, attached in a direct line to his cock.

“General Zod would like _this_ woman to accompany me.”

The softness of her voice had surprised him, the low purr of sound doing things low in his belly. She pointed at Lois Lane and Nathan had bristled. The anger boiled up and he barked. Faora, her gaze flat and blue and still, waited as if she expected no other outcome except Lois’s company on the dropship.

A fight, he knows now, would have been okay, too. Learned that later, watching her through fire and smoke and a hail of bullets. _A good death_, she had told him, _is its own reward_. A giant fuck-all knife in one fist, and finally, there had been fear.

Nathan inhales, a shallow airless pant carrying the faint copper tang of blood. Chest arched and tightening, he counts backward from ten, willing the panic back. Struggling will not make this any easier. That same hard, red knot lodges behind his sternum because this is not what he meant when he had parroted her words back at her before tipping the C-17 into the Black Zero.

She was beautiful then; she is beautiful now. Still small, still oddly tranquil and startlingly vicious.

Faora tilts her head as if she can read his mind, her mouth curling up to join the crinkling of her eyes. It’s a real smile, a rare smile, a breath away from the parting of her ruby mouth because of course she can read his mind. The Phantom Zone has dissolved the space between them. She has his want and his need and his pain. It unfurls from his mind in a red tide.

Nathan drowns, fades out, but the Phantom Zone is not a place for dying.

*

The next night, Faora licks up the side of his face, his breather shimmering at the pressure of her tongue. He’s strapped to the floor, the breather’s harness digging into his back where it presses into the deck. Nathan pulls up against the restraints, biceps straining. He stares straight ahead, up at the patchworked bulkhead above them, picks out the soldered bits of the C-17 reinforcing the Black Zero’s hull.

Faora whispers into his ear and slides a dagger angled upward cleanly between his ribs. Punctures his lung and fucks him while he suffocates.

There is no air. There is never air. Faora likes to watch him fight for breath, body straining and jerking. Betrayed by his body, forced into a submission he does not willingly offer, whether is heart will go first or his lungs doesn’t even matter.

His orgasm crests as his lung collapses.

Her hair is longer than it was, a sweep of black that falls just beneath her chin. Gillian Anderson flashes through his short-circuiting brain, red hair fading to black. Dana Scully bleeding into Ro Laren. Too antiseptic, too cerebral, but the stars of his fantasies all the same. Nathan’s breath comes short and Faora arches above him. She tightens around him, wet and sloppy with come and blood. Mouth wide, her screams are soundless.

Bucking against him, she brings the knife down into his chest over and over.

Her anger races through his body, lighting up nerve endings, and filling up the corners of his brain not electrified by orgasm, not fading from blood loss.

_Zod. Krypton. Everything._

There is an echo beneath the anger, a hollow, aching emptiness that carries the flavor of home.

Nathan has her loss and her grief, it bruises his dying heart, and then he has nothing at all.

*

They, none of them, sleep, but closing their eyes can feel like escape and it passes the time. He slips away from her then. Finds Emil near the engines, maps and star charts, schematics spread out. Studying. Trying to find them a way home or at least a way into real space. Sometimes, Jax-Ur crouches beside him, digging through scavenged parts and drawing distractedly in the dust.

Faora follows, always. Finds Nathan always sooner than he hopes, always sooner than he plans.

The hair on the back of his neck prickles first, and a shudder ripples across his body. He can _feel _her, more than just the telepathy created by the Phantom Zone, the second sense of prey animals. Everything around him goes still, hands clammy and trembling. He holds his breath out of habit, as if that will help him to hide.

“Your presence is required.”

“Not now, Faora,” Nathan says without looking back, his words bitten short.

He knows what she looks like, can imagine her standing in her black body suit, hands crossed behind her back. She will tilt her head, her blue eyes flat. Her eyes used to unnerve him, the emptiness, but he’s seen her break, seen her come apart and he’s learned to prefer the placidness that masks the storm.

“There is no other time here except for now. You will come with me.”

Nathan ignores her, focuses on relaxing the muscles in his body one by one. The sharp clink of a metal part falling against the makeshift table makes him flinch, the sound too loud and too sharp and too _obvious._ He breathes deeps, counts back ward from twenty and wills his trembling hands to steady. The parts in front of him slide together in a complex fit of unlikely parts as he continues piecing together the gadget that Emil has drawn out. He doesn’t completely understand what it’s for, what it will do, but he trusts that Dr. Hamilton does and he follows the diagram carefully.

Crouched beside the bulk of an escape pod, pulling its inside out, Emil watches them, darting eyes shifting nervously between them.

“Fuck off,” Nathan growls.

“Yes.” Faora’s voice is light and sly and amused. “Exactly that.”

She is still stronger than he is, even without the yellow sun, without the armor. Faora was a monster on Earth, and in the Phantom Zone she is still a beast, the Tigress of Zod for a reason.

Her hand fits snug around the back of his neck, collar like a dog.

Nathan swings backward. The struggle doesn’t change a thing.

*

Faora paces the length of the Zod’s old chamber, watching the stars slowly spinning past the Black Zero. Her body is limned by the thin light scattered through the meteorite field.

“Tell me of the woman Sarah Connor,” she says in her soft voice.

Another thing Nathan regrets: stories whispered in the small hours when she can’t rest.

He leans up in the bed, props himself against the headboard, a hand pressed against the still bleeding gouges in his side.

_Fuck off_, hovers on his mouth, held back by the reality of where that might land him. Her fingers inside the gouges tracing his ribcage and how that means pain until she tires of it. No one will interrupt, his screams echo through the ship and no one ever stops her. They are afraid, even Nam-Ek, three times her size. Terminator is a preferable option for a bed time story. The last time she asked for The Art of War and he lost track of the days and nights he spent pinned to the wall.

“Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day.”

Nathan imagines home and Saturday morning at the movie theater. Let’s the nostalgia swell and buffet against the dream of vengeance and the end of the world reflected at him.

The story is the wrong shape in places, out of order, but he tells it to her anyway. Cobbles together what he can, hazily mashing what he remembers and whispering the story to her rigid back.

**Author's Note:**

> lyric from See You Bleed by Ramsey.
> 
> Some Phantom Zone characteristics (e.g. telepathy in the zone) borrowed from the comics and kind of mashed into the Man of Steel DCEU.
> 
> "The Phantom Zone is an interdimensional realm outside the normal space/time continuum. It is a barren and insubstantial null area absent of any physical material. Communication within the Phantom Zone is done so by telepathy. As the Phantom Zone exists outside of space/time, those within it are no longer subject to the rigors of age or illness, rendering them effectively immortal – and they also require no sleep, food or air." - Phantom Zone, DC Database, https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Phantom_Zone
> 
> Find me on Dreamwidth and tumblr as seraphcelene. :)


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